Daniel was traveling tonight on a plane, which was nothing extraordinary since Daniel traveled a lot, going to and fro in the air so frequently that one could safely say that Daniel had no permanent address. Yes, indeed, no permanent address at all. In fact, this once tried and true description of one’s station in life, where one actually resided, on a permanent basis, was becoming obsolete among a certain subset of the population.
Daniel, who insisted on using it/that pronouns, was in fact one of them, the Neo Zen folks, ages roughly 15-25, who had started living on airplanes. There were hundreds or thousands of them in the skies at any moment, crisscrossing the nation or even the globe. Sometimes, they would intentionally converge at some airport’s private lounges to have freakout events, as they called them, leaving the place utterly destroyed, tabs unpaid, all the liquor bottles drained and everyone back on board on different flights heading to parts unknown.
You could tell these Neo Zen travelers by the tiny airplane wings tattooed behind their left ears. Not that you needed that marker to identify them per se, as they were pretty noticeable once you knew what to look for: young and brash with spiky dyed hair, large 1970’s plastic glasses frames, faces buried in their phone screens without a care in the world and completely unconcerned about displaying any social graces. They belched and farted, reached across people sitting next to them, chewed with their mouths open and laughed loudly and obnoxiously when they saw a funny video on their TikTok feeds.
Daniel was one of the early adapters and someone that many of the other Neo Zen flyers looked up to. “Daniel’s here!”, someone would say excitedly as the sliding doors to the lounge opened and it walked in, phone up to it’s face, swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniels before finally looking up and surveying the room.
This group of airborne ruffians, the plane gang, as Time magazine had called them, had developed a spurious method of using crypto funds to buy airline tickets. They didn’t have to be your own crypto funds at all, they could be anyone’s. Any member of the group, once they learned the method, could buy an endless supply of airfares and pretty much live constantly in the skies and in the airports without any permanent address whatsoever.
Whenever any of the Neo Zens actually did occasionally pass through the sliding exit doors of an airport and get into a car to go visit family for a few days or whatever, they were said to have “landed”. When the rest of the group learned that one of them had “landed”, they would roll their eyes and grimace in empathy with the poor kid who had to stop traveling for a few seemingly interminable days and be subjected to the melliferous odor and stale and suffocating mannerisms of their family home. The friends and acquaintances would, with genuine worry, wish that their landed companion would be OK and would soon return safely to their traveling ways. Having one of the group away in landed mode was painful for all.
In fact, once one of the Neo Zens had returned from being landed, there would surely be a big party on their first flight back, and there was nothing anybody could do about it; not captain or crew or passengers or even the FAA or the TSA. Homeland Security? Give me a break. Nobody could touch these aerial ruffians. They were about as worried of being put on the no-fly list as you would be frightened if an ant crossed your toe.
The threat of prosecution or any kind of impedance to their activities was totally insignificant. They had the means to create new identities, new passports, wipe clean their status as if that destruction of the Sky Lounge in Dallas never happened. Daniel themselves had done it numerous times. They had amazing disguises to jam up facial recognition cameras. If they wanted to get on a certain flight, there was nobody that could stop them.
Daniel themselves had just come back from being landed for an entire week, pulling up to the St. Louis airport in a big-ass Lincoln Navigator. He got out without acknowledging the driver at all, and entered through the sliding glass doors into the ticketing area, breathing a sigh of relief. Daniel had contracted some kind of intestinal virus and decided to go home and get medical treatment. It was that bad. If it hadn’t been potentially life-threatening, they would have powered through it with endless drink and drugs until it eventually went away, or they just didn’t feel it anymore.
The week at the family home in a little shabby chic shotgun shack on the banks of the Mississippi had not gone well. Daniel had no intention of reconciliation with Ma nor bro and sis (Bro had been Sis, and Sis had been Bro, but in the intervening years since Daniel went aloft permanently, their genders had been exchanged). The family, on the other hand, clinging to traditional notions of love and connection amongst kinfolks, especially the nuclear family, were somewhat frustrated and exasperated in their efforts to get Daniel to acknowledge any kind of bond whatsoever. In Daniel’s heart, there was nothing at all that resembled that sentiment.
So, it was with lot of sadness, and relief, a lot of deep breathing, that Daniel’s time at home came to an end at they called for a car on their phone. Ma had been exasperated by Daniel’s complete and total attention to their little screen and inattention to anything else, that she was a mess, with feelings of loss, anger, frustration, and ultimately letting go. By the end of the week, intestinal issue resolved, she was ready for them to get the fuck out of the house and stay out, if that’s how it was going to be.
Daniel had booked a flight to Panama City and all their closest friends had rerouted in order to get to St. Louis in time to be on the same flight. It was an early evening departure, Daniel’s favorite time of debauchery. They occupied three entire rows in the middle of the airplane and as they taxied toward takeoff, Daniel dropped a little red pill in each of their fellow Neo Zen’s gin and tonic. “This is going to be so lit!” they shouted and all the Neo Zens screamed in delight as the wheels lifted off of the tarmac.
THE MOSSY BOG 